Sermon Archive	Sermon Archive
Jesus: As He Comes Out of the Closet Opening Words As Unitarian Universalists, many of us have left behind serious study of Jesus. This morning we will look at the possibility that what we left behind is the mythical figure created by church theology while we have ignored the real historical Jesus. What we may find is intellectual interest in the historical man and a love of the mythical story. Our hymns will reflect the mythical figure and story of Jesus. First Reading He comes as yet unknown into a hamlet of Lower Galilee. He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution. He looks like a beggar, yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle. He speaks about the rule of God and they listen as much from curiosity as anything else. They know all about rule and power, about kingdom and empire, but they know it in terms of tax and debt, malnutrition and sickness, agrarian oppression and demonic possession. What, they really want to know, can this Kingdom of God do for a lame child, a blind parent, a demented soul screaming its tortured isolation among the graves that mark the village fringes? Jesus walks with them to the tombs, and in the silence after he has exorcised the woman they brought him to see, the villagers listen once more, but now with curiosity giving way to cupidity, fear, and embarrassment. He is invited, as honour demands, to the home of the village leader. He goes, instead, to stay in the home of the dispossessed woman. Not quite proper, to be sure, but it would be unwise to censure an exorcist, to criticize a magician. The village could yet broker this power to its surroundings, could give this Kingdom of God a localization, a place to which others would come for healing, a centre with honour and patronage enough for all - even, maybe, for that dispossessed woman herself. But the next day he leaves them, and now they wonder aloud about a divine kingdom with no respect for proper protocols - a kingdom, as he had said, not just for the poor, like themselves, but for the destitute. Others say that the worst and most powerful demons are found not in small villages but in certain cities. Maybe, they say, that was where the exorcised demon went - to Sepphoris or Tiberias, or even Jerusalem, or maybe to Rome itself, where its arrival would hardly be noticed amid so many others already in residence. But some say nothing at all and ponder the possibility of catching up with Jesus before he gets too far. Even Jesus himself had not always seen things that way. Earlier he had received John's baptism and accepted his message of God as the imminent apocalyptic judge. But the Jordan was not just water, and to be baptized in it was to recapitulate the ancient and archetypal passage from imperial bondage to national freedom. Herod Antipas moved swiftly to execute John, there was no apocalyptic consummation, and Jesus, finding his own voice, began to speak of God not as imminent apocalypse but as present healing. To those first followers from the peasant villages of Lower Galilee who asked how to repay his exorcisms and cures, he gave a simple answer - simple, that is, to understand, but hard as death itself to undertake. You are healed healers, he said, so take the Kingdom to others, for I am not its patron and you are not its brokers. It is, was, and always will be available to any who want it. Dress as I do, like a beggar, but do not beg. Bring a miracle and request a table. Those you heal must accept you into their homes. That ecstatic vision and social program sought to rebuild a society upward from its grass roots, but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenge launched not just on the level of Judaism's strictest purity regulations, or even on that of the Mediterranean's patriarchal combination of honour and shame, patronage and clientage, but at the most basic level of civilization's most dangerous depths. No importance was given to distinctions of Gentile and Jew, female and male, slave and free, poor and rich. Those distinctions were hardly even attacked in theory; in practice, they were simply ignored. [Crossan, John Dominic, JESUS: A Revolutionary Biography(New York: Harper Collins, 1994, p. 194 - 196.)] Second Reading . . . about three hundred years after the crucifixion of Jesus, on 28 October 312 C.E., the Roman emperor Constantine, believing that the victory over his imperial rival Maxentius near Rome's Milvan Bridge had been obtained by Christ's power, converted to Christianity. It is interesting, by the way, that we know that event to the day but we know the date of Jesus' death only as sometime within the decade of years, from 26 to 36 C.E. In any case, Constantine, wanting a unified Christianity as the empire's new religion, ordered the Christian bishops to meet, under imperial subsidy, in lakeside Nicea, southeast of Constantinople, and there erase any major theological disagreements between them. Even if one is not already somewhat disquieted at imperial convocation, presence, and participation, it is hard not to become very nervous in reading this description of the imperial banquet celebrating the Council of Nicea's conclusion, from Eusebius's Life of Constantine 3.15: Detachments of the bodyguard and troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of them the men of God proceeded without fear into the innermost of the imperial apartments, in which some were the Emperor's companion at table, while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ's kingdom was thus shadowed forth, and a dream rather than a reality. A Christian leader now writes a life not of Jesus but of Constantine. The meal and the Kingdom still come together, but now the participants are the male bishops alone, and they recline, with the emperor himself, to be served by others. Dream or reality? Dream or nightmare? [Crossan, p. 201.] SERMON This morning we will continue the story we started last week when I presented some Biblical history from the Middle Ages to the present. We heard about how the King James Bible came into being and reigned supreme for over 250 years before the Standard Bible and then the Revised Standard Bible and the New English Bible came into being. Biblical scholarship, archaeology, politics, and linguistics all had their say in decisions about the Bibles. The newest version, the collection of five gospels published last year by The Jesus Seminar, a collection of 73 Biblical scholars from all around the world, includes the four traditional gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as well as the Gospel of Thomas. We heard about the Gospel of Thomas, the "Q" document, and Mark as sources for Matthew and Luke. This morning we will look further back in history, at the formation of the church, at the figure of Jesus, and who the Jesus Seminar says he was and how they came to such a view. Unlike last week where we moved forward in time from the Middle Ages to the present, today we will move backward from the Council of Nicea called by Constantine in 312 C.E. to the time of Jesus himself. We will see some of the faith groups which developed and how they forced the growth of the Catholic Church into a rigid presence. Comments will be made linking some of the early disagreements to Reformation theologies. We will hear about some of the sources which scholars used as they pieced this history together. Let me issue a disclaimer. I am not an expert in this field. Many of your questions I could not answer, I am sure. An expert would have a Ph.D. in Religion. I have had three years of graduate level in religious studies. The Ph.D. would require an additional seven years. Nevertheless, I believe I can present vignettes of the history in a way which might have enough handles on it so that we can remember at least portions of it. So let us begin . . . By the time that Constantine called the Council at Nicea there was a well established sense of the Christian Catholic Church. There were Bishops in all the larger cities. The name Catholic had been in use since it overcame the challenges of two variants, Gnosticism and Montanism, in the middle to end of the second century of the Common Era. By that time, the church has leaders, Bishops, a cannon, the New Testament, and a creed had been formulated. To meet the challenges of offshoot religions it was important to organize, to have a common body of literature and to require common assent to a creed. This allowed the church, not only to define its faith, but to shut out all who did not accept its creed or officers. The creed was finalized by the middle of the second century and was spread from Rome. It is a statement of faith which is not unlike those in use today in some Christian churches: I believe in God the Father Almighty; and in Christ Jesus, His only begotten Son, Our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried; the third day, He rose from the dead, ascended into the heavens, being seated at the right hand of the Father, whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead; and in the Holy Spirit, holy church, forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the flesh." [(Walker, Williston, History of the Christian Church, (New York: Charles Scribner, 1918, p. 61)] Such a common liturgical statement would clearly set the boundaries of the faith for the budding church. The early theologians, Tertullian and Irenaeus, both felt that the statement was an important step in establishing the "Rule of Faith" and tying the New Testament closely to the prophesy of the Old Testament. The New Testament came together during this time, but it was not the work of any particular group of people. The same texts simply came to be widely used by many small congregations. There were more gospels than made it into the New Testament. The ones that made it did so because of the popular sense that these books were written by the apostles or their immediate followers. Thus Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were included, then came the books of Acts, the letters of Paul, and so on. The Old Testament, according to ancient tradition, was freely quoted as the word of God. Over a period of time the New Testament works were quoted side by side with the Old Testament words. Whether they were quoted side by side because the New Testament words carried the weight of the word of God already or as a way to impart the sense that they were the word of God, we do not know. It is likely that both faith and the blessings of association were at work in giving these gospels legitimacy. Shortly after the end of the first century C.E. Barnabas and Paul referred to the New Testament as Scripture; they placed the collection on an equal footing with the Old Testament. By the middle of that second century, the gospels were read freely as scripture in the churches around Rome. In the gospels we meet for the first time a new literary form. They were not biographies of the Hellenistic form with great interest in the external and internal history of the hero, nor do they reflect Hellenistic miracle stories in which, through a rather fixed style, the great miracles of the hero were glorified. They are also not related to the ancient memoir literature in which the stories and words of great men were loosely arranged. The gospels were not written to glorify Jesus or his miracles. The real reason the gospels were written was to transmit the "good news" of the faith. The word 'gospel' in the Greek means "news of salvation" and in the Hebrew it means "to transmit the news of salvation." [Feine-Behm-Kummel, Introduction to the New Testament(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966, p. 31.)] The leading interest in writing the gospels was the awakening of faith and strengthening of faith. The sayings and deeds of Jesus are collected out of his life and repeated in the form of simple narrative in order to show primitive Christian congregations the ground of their faith and to give the missionaries a firm foundation for preaching, instruction, and argument with opponents. The Gospels are for the use of the congregation, for reading in worship, for the missionaries, and to argue with against opponents. [Feine-Behm-Kummel, p. 31-33.)] You may have noticed that I spoke of Rome in the first century as having some authority in the Christian world. After the fall of Jerusalem in 135 and the successful fights against Montanism and Gnosticism, and with Rome having the largest Christian congregation, and, being the only one in the West which could claim direct contact with the Apostles, Peter and Paul having lived and died there, the leaders of the congregation in Rome began to speak with a voice that assumed others would listen and even obey (Walker, p. 63). After another several hundred years, Christianity was well accepted and Constantine could declare it the religion of the land. By 300 C.E. the memories of the persecution of Christians in the arena by Nero were gone. To help us understand just what this new Christianity was, we need to do more than know how it developed into a church, need to know more than the creed, the acceptance of a scripture. We also need to know what it was not, what it resisted. I have mentioned Montanism and Gnosticism. Just a few words about each before we move further back in time toward Jesus. Montanism has an abrupt beginning and a waning end. In the last quarter of the second century C.E., in the city of Phygria, a man named Montanus was seized by the Holy Spirit and along with two woman prophets, Prisca and Maximilla, formed a church that was based on the spirituality of all men and women rather than the authority of bishops, as was developing in other cities, notably, Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. The Roman church resisted by citing Montanism as dangerous because it could lead to divisiveness when individuals disagreed about the interpretation of their own contact with the Holy Spirit and it could lead to excessive personal pride. Montanists believed that the Lord would come to the earth soon and proclaim Phygria as the spiritual centre. Needless to say, Rome did not like this and had to respond. The Montanists survived the death some years later of its namesake, Montanus, and then continued in cult like form under Prisca and Maximilla. Tertullian, who had helped write the Roman creed became a convert because he disagreed with the growing power of Bishops in the Roman church [Chadwick, Henry, The Early Church(Baltimore: Penguin, 1969, p. 52 - 53)]. I do not have access to materials which can answer my questions, but it would be interesting to know more about the use of power in this group. Did they foreshadow Congregationalism at all? Gnosticism presented a greater challenge to the early Christian church. It had existed for a long time in many forms. I can not attempt a history of Gnosticism here. Whether it existed before and had Christian elements added to it or grew in reaction to Christianity is academic and still argued, though both seem true to me. [For my view of history, scholars tend to be much too narrow in their interests. While that narrow specialty provides us with depth of knowledge, it tends to create a myopia that leads to divisive arguments rather than embracing discussions.] Paul encountered Gnosticism in two places. In Corinth a spiritual aristocracy developed where some men claimed higher knowledge, more profound wisdom, deeper mystical experiences for themselves. They regarded themselves as perfect so resurrection held no power for them, neither did any final judgement. They believed that the spirit was everything and the body counted for nothing. One result was that the acts of the body, counting for so little, became a source of pleasure and they became quite promiscuous. In reaction, another group formed in Corinth which believed that the body was evil and so marriages were not consummated and previously married couples refrained from intercourse. Both groups rejected the Hebraic resurrection of the body and accepted the resurrection of the soul alone [Chadwick, p. 33 - 34]. As if this was not enough for Paul to put up with, in Colossae in Asia Minor, he found a group worshipping angels. The angels could determine the fate of human beings regardless of the gospels. Special rituals were followed as were strict ascetic practices [Chadwick, p. 34]. The budding Catholic church countered these groups by saying that any special knowledge imparted by Jesus during the forty days in the desert would certainly have been imparted by Peter and Paul to the rest of the Bishops (Chadwick, p. 43). The development of a creed helped isolate the Montanists and Gnostics. Resistance to Montanism and Gnosticism brought the early Catholic church together and encouraged the use of a creed to bond and limit the community. The agreement on a set of gospels for the New Testament gave the church a missionary tool. A hierarchical structure for the church was hardly possible to avoid considering the need to centralize in order to spread a uniform Christianity. The fate of the hierarchical structure was sealed at that meeting in Nicea in 312 C.E. where Constantine set the power and support of the imperial mode in front of and around the bishops. Certainly Constantine wanted a structure he understood and could control. Through this brief history we can appreciate some of what happened to the image of Jesus in the nearly three centuries following his death. much of what transpired happened because of the birth of an institution, the Catholic church. We certainly find in the roots of the early church the idea of Unitarianism through Origen, Emerson's transcendentalism is foreshadowed in the ecstasy of the Montanists, though Emerson was a bit more subdued. Certainly the speaking in tongues amongst Baptists and groups like the Holy Rollers were foreshadowed. The rudiments of Calvin's doctrine of the elect can be found in Gnosticism's parallel of special knowledge and special privilege. The Lutheran idea of salvation by faith is located in the first written creed of the Catholic church. While there is no direct link between these ideas, we can easily say, "Little that has happened since the death of Jesus is new, but for the spin doctor's spell in each century." For the rest of our time this morning we will turn our attention to Jesus, the historical Jesus as described by John Crossan of The Jesus Seminar, the world's foremost expert on the historical Jesus. He is a professor at DePaul University at the University of Chicago. In our first reading we had a taste of what it might have been like for Jesus as he wandered from village to village during his ministry. We know that he was baptised by John in the Jordan into a sect that believed that the end of the world was at hand. For his preaching, John was beheaded. I remember a movie I saw as a child where the head of John was ordered brought before the Queen - it showed up during the meal, on a platter. The result of that too early vision was that for years I did not want anything to do with the Bible. Any book which would have such scenes in it was bad. I offer this vignette by way of saying to parents who want more Bible stories in the church school, that we must be very careful about how and when such stories are introduced. The Bible is a book that most adults do not even fully understand - though for many Unitarians it is still a source of spiritual sustenance. How much this has to do with the ethics of the Bible or with the longing for simpler times when good and evil were easier to spot and times were less confusing, I dare not guess, though my presumption is that both may be part of the picture. We can never know if the loss of John's life had anything to do with the change in Jesus, from a member of the apocalyptic community to an itinerant preacher touting a message of radical religious, social, and economic equality. What can we know? We will look briefly at his youth, his ministry and his relationship to the Qumran community this morning. I have chosen these three because there is mystery surrounding his youth, there is misinformation surrounding his message, and there are popular theories tying him to the Righteous Teacher at Qumran. This Thursday and Thursday the following week we will look closely at his radical message of free healing and free sharing of meals, and at the events of the last supper, Good Friday and Easter. In so far as we are able, we will follow the materials of the Jesus Seminar in their approach to finding out about the Historical Jesus. Much of their work has relied on ancient works like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library. What I can say today is fragmentary. There simply is not time for more in a half hour talk. The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in a Palestinian desert cave west of the Dead Sea by an Arab shepherd boy in 1947, just before the establishment of the state of Israel. Over the years scrolls were taken from 11 caves in the Judean Desert near Khirbet Qumran. They were found in the ruins of a community of priests exiled from the temple in Jerusalem. The community existed from about 150 B.C.E. till it was destroyed by the Roman Tenth Legion in 68 C.E. The oldest scrolls are carbon dated to 250 B.C.E. or 100 years before any community was formed at Qumran (150 B.C.E.). Written in Aramaic and Hebrew, the scrolls seem untouched by any Christian scribe. The community at Qumran was opposed to and opposed by the Jerusalem Temple, saw themselves as the "sons of light", the "holy ones" who "lived in the house of holiness." The priest of the Jerusalem Temple was "the wicked one". They were far right Essenes. While they existed during the ministry of Jesus, there is no mention of Jesus in the Qumran material. Some scholars allowed the possibility that Jesus was the Righteous Teacher of the Qumran community to get into the stream of popularized Middle Eastern history. There is no evidence that Jesus and the Righteous Teacher are the same. In fact there is a substantial body of evidence that they are different -Just look at their deaths. The Righteous Teacher, while the subject of persecutions and "vengeance on his flesh" by what was called the "Wicked Priest," died of the "horrors of evil disease" while Jesus was crucified [Ed. by Charlesworth , James H.,Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls(Toronto: Doubleday, 1992, p. 275 ff.)]. The Nag Hammadi Library, discovered in 1945 in Egypt, was not printed until 1977 because of jealousy and politics. It is a great Gnostic library. The works are widely divergent in their viewpoints though all the authors are Christians. They are broadly Gnostic in interpretation. They were heretical in the early church and had the library been known it would likely have been destroyed. In a sense, though not literally, the Nag Hammadi was a continuation of the Jewish Qumran ideals in a Christian setting . . . One document, The Apocalypse of Peter, proclaimed that those who are bishops and deacons are like dry canals (useless). The Bishop of Cypress describes his contact with Gnostic women who try to seduce him and then tells of expelling eighty Gnostics from the city so that they were rid of their tar-like and thorny growth! [Robinson, James M, The Nag Hammadi Library(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988, p. 5 ff.)] The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library helped us to understand some of what was happening before and after the time of Jesus. We have learned history, local customs, and theology from these documents. We have also put to rest false speculation about who Jesus was. He was not the Righteous Teacher of Qumran. What help do we have in finding out about the childhood of Jesus? We do not know who his friends were, but we can say something about where he grew up. Here we get to the core of how John Crossan thinks. When we read in Luke and Matthew that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Crossan says we are into mythology. Bethlehem as Jesus' birthplace is dictated in Samuel by the location of David's birth and in Micah as the birth of the future David who will lead the Israelites from the social injustice, foreign domination, and colonial exploitation that had swept over Jewish territory [Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 19]. Matthew cites Micah's prophecy as reason for Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. The Gospel authors had to show that Jesus fulfilled prophecy. Luke has the family of Joseph and Mary start at Nazareth, then they go to Bethlehem to be enroled, because a decree had gone out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. The family went to Bethlehem because Joseph was of the lineage of and the house of David. All of this name dropping and lineage stuff may attempt to give the family good credentials, but it is the stuffing of pillows in historical weight. There was no worldwide census under Octavius Augustus. And we know from other census reports that people were not sent to their home towns to register. They registered in the towns where they lived and worked. What do the discrepancies mean? In all likelihood, Luke and Matthew were continuing their tradition of tying material to the Old Testament prophecy, as they had with the virgin birth, and further they wanted to be sure Jesus was linked to the lineage of the King David. As an aside, let me add that the statements about the virgin birth have nothing to do with Mary's body and everything to do with a confessional statement about Jesus (Ibid., p. 23). In John (7:41-42) there is an argument about how Jesus could have come from Galilee when prophecy said he should have come from Bethlehem. In all probability, he came from and grew up in Galilee, most likely Nazareth (Ibid., p. 20). It is unlikely that his parents fled with him to Egypt. In Nazareth he would have been exposed to nearby city life and the thoughts of Jewish Cynics. Cynics? What are the Greek Jewish Cynics? It has little to do with modern meanings of belief in nothing or doubt about everything, or the more harsh version of disparaging others beliefs. No. Cynicism in those days was a positive statement of anticivilization and counterculture. It was as much a positive negation of the world as was John the Baptist's apocalyptic vision of the coming judgement. Jesus and his followers presented a positive and radically different view of society to the people they lived amongst. In a highly stratified society Jesus preached radical equality. The Greek Cynics had missionaries for their ideals, strict in their codes - wearing coarse cloaks exposing one shoulder, carrying in a small pack all their worldly belongings, and holding a staff. Both were symbolic. The pack said Greek Cynics were self sufficient and the staff said they were wanderers. Jesus' followers, simple Jewish Cynics, did not use the pack and the staff. They did not use the pack because they wanted to show dependency on the communities they came to, the people they healed. The Greek Cynics were urbanites with little community attachment. Jesus preached in the countryside to peasants where community was not only possible but necessary and carried no staff because he would stay for a while. The message was heal, stay, then move on [Ibid., p. 117-119]. There is so much knowledge from so many different disciplines that Crossan and the Jesus Seminar uses to get to the 'truth' in each phrase of the gospels that I could feel intimidated. Instead, I learn about religion, literature, archaeology, politics, military history, ancient cultures, etc. As I take on each new chapter. Reading the books of the Jesus Seminar I begin to think differently about the world today. Not only am I challenged to reconsider the ethics of Jesus, he did not preach love and acceptance, he preached a radical equality of people and preached it to the most oppressed, I am challenged to ask about where those ethics might be applied today, and what the cost might be to our culture. Because of the lessons found in the story of the birth of the Catholic church, I will be more careful about what I do in reaction to others, for I saw a church become rigid and defensive while protecting itself from different ideas. I saw the democratic exchange of ideals betrayed by the old boy network of emperor and bishops. I will continue to be suspect of old boy networks. And there is more, but there is not much more time today. Last week and this week the sermons have been more akin to lectures. Next week we will return to a more familiar format. This Thursday evening we will continue our exploration of the thinking and findings of the Jesus Seminar. There is no sign-up sheet - just come - you need not read to discuss. The book table may still have a copy or two of the Crossan book available. The Nepean Library at Centrepoint had a copy on Friday. Prospero at Carlingwood had several copies of The Five Gospels. The key to being challenged is the new way of thinking that the Jesus Seminar will introduce to you. Let me encourage you not to simply take in the new knowledge, but to be open to the process of thinking that Crossan offers to us. If we are open, then the life of Jesus, even as we may disagree with the applicability of his message for this world, the life of Jesus will alter us radically - and that prophet will have again changed a generation - transformed them. I hope to see many of you on Thursday evening. ENTRUSTING THE FLAME Even years after we have made judgements, let us always be open to new perspectives so that we never pass up the opportunity to be made new by life. Let us go together in peace and caring. A-men.	What to expect on Sundays Religious Sources "Views From These Pews"